"Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals" is an ancient game from 2008. It's a whopping 16 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware.
This is a Myst clone, basically you're presented with a first person 3D scene that you can look around and interact with, but movement is a matter of "teleporting" between these static scenes. Not a true FPS game, which makes it again a little obsolete. The idea is that you're a nice guy in a dystopian alternative world/society, and egytpian aliens crash land with their space pyramid so you need go to sort all that out, I guess. Hey, even terrible game concepts can work if the gameplay and technical execution are good enough. Just look at Helldivers 2. Anyway, it's worth mentioning the graphics here are kind of okay for a 2008 game... but that's just about all this has going for it.
On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.
The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio, due to the age of the game, it predates the 16:9 widescreen gaming standard established back in 2006 (2 years before this launched, so there's really no excuse for not being aware of the gaming environment at the time). It's possible they're marketing this towards people using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game is being specifically marketed towards people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. It's obviously not going to look right on a modern 16:9 gaming display.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
"Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $5 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.
